Illinois Connection

Graham resides in Urbana, Illinois.

Biographical and Professional Information

Philip Graham teaches at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he is a co-founder and the current fiction editor of the literary/arts journal ''Ninth Letter'', and is the recipient of three campus teaching awards. He also teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in Writing.Three of his books are available in ebook format ''The Art of the Knock'', ''How to Read an Unwritten Language'' and ''Interior Design''.

Awards

-- 1991 - Special Mention citation for the short story,

The Reverse,

Light Bulbs,

short story, performed by actress Mary Ann Thebus (directed by Steve Scott) for Stories on Stage, Organic Theatre, Chicago, Illinois, December 14, 1992. -- 1992 - The William Peden Prize in Fiction, awarded by The Missouri Review for the short story,

Selected Titles At Your Library

The effect on children of a mother's role-playing games in which they had to participate until she went mad and died. The daughter continues the tradition by becoming an actress while the son develops a passion for collecting artifacts with a story, such as a radio antenna with which a man attempted suicide by lightning.

Interior Design presents a gallery of people who, for all their strangeness, seem deeply, touchingly familiar as they explore the designs of their private inner thoughts. Huddled under his covers with a flashlight, a young boy lies awake listening to his parents' bitter arguments, and he draws maps of imaginary planets on tennis balls, creating little worlds where his troubled family is somehow happy. A young man becomes obsessed with the idea of his guardian angel, and lives each day believing that it jealously hovers at his side, hungry for his every thought.

A collection of eight stories. The story, The Pose, is a wife's attempt to arouse her husband, Lucky looks at the effect on a shoe salesman of his clientele dying off, and The Reverse traces the way a woman's job--she is an actress--changes her private life.

"This suspenseful and moving memoir of Africa recounts the experiences of Alma Gottlieb, an anthropologist, and Philip Graham, a fiction writer, as they lived in two remote villages in the rain forest of Cote d'Ivoire. With an unusual coupling of first-person narratives, their alternate voices tell a story imbued with sweeping narrative power, humility, and gentle humor. Parallel Worlds is a unique look at Africa, anthropological fieldwork, and the artistic process."--BOOK JACKET.

In the three-part title story of The Art of the Knock, a travelling salesman knocks with inventive delight on the stubborn, closed doors of his prospective customerspeople who find themselves on the wrong side of their own invisible doors. In the face of their mutual solitudes, they devise odd, personal rituals that connect and isolate them at the same time. Two lonely parents, their children grown and far away, begin to adopt and then fight over the light bulbs in their house; a husband returns home to discover that every lie he ever told his wife has been spray-painted on the walls; an el.

A dispatch from a foreign land, when crafted by an attentive and skilled writer, can be magical, transmitting pleasure, drama, and seductive strangeness. In The Moon, Come to Earth, Philip Graham offers an expanded edition of a popular series of dispatches originally published on McSweeney's, an exuberant yet introspective account of a year's sojourn in Lisbon with his wife and daughter. Casting his attentive gaze on scenes as broad as a citywide arts festival and as small as a single paving stone in a cobbled walk, Graham renders Lisbon from a perspective that varies between wide-eyed and kno.

A dispatch from a foreign land, when crafted by an attentive and skilled writer, can be magical, transmitting pleasure, drama, and seductive strangeness. In The Moon, Come to Earth, Philip Graham offers an expanded edition of a popular series of dispatches originally published on McSweeney's, an exuberant yet introspective account of a year's sojourn in Lisbon with his wife and daughter. Casting his attentive gaze on scenes as broad as a citywide arts festival and as small as a single paving stone in a cobbled walk, Graham renders Lisbon from a perspective that varies between wide-eyed and knowing; though he's unquestionably not a tourist, at the same time he knows he will never be a local. So his lyrical accounts reveal his struggles with (and love of) the Portuguese language, an awkward meeting with Nobel laureate José Saramago, being trapped in a budding soccer riot, and his daughter's challenging transition to adolescence while attending a Portuguese school--but he also waxes loving about Portugal's saudade-drenched music, its inventive cuisine, and its vibrant literary culture. And through his humorous, self-deprecating, and wistful explorations, we come to know Graham himself, and his wife and daughter, so that when an unexpected crisis hits his family, we can't help but ache alongside them. A thoughtful, finely wrought celebration of the moment-to-moment excitement of diving deep into another culture and confronting one's secret selves, The Moon, Come to Earth is literary travel writing of a rare intimacy and immediacy.